Solutions to Social Production, Morale, and Waste

Inspired by the thread on dealing with wasted social production. https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=346&AID=105246

It was said that excess social production would no longer be wasted in the future, but would instead be used to increase approval. I have a suggestion (basically a rehash of what others have said first) that would complement that, allowing for greater flexibility in colony management that would simultaneously lower the amount of micromanagement required, and it would all happen without creating the treasury fluctuations that a "unused social production is returned as BC" system would.

Earlier today I made a custom race with +50% Military and +50% Social production, to see how that would work out. Controlling waste was basically impossible, thanks to the Social bonus. I had to turn my social spending way down so my industrial planets (which already had all the improvements) wouldn't kill my economy, but in the process I had to kill social production on all of my newer colonies. Specializing in Social production on my small colonies helped a little, but certainly not enough.

While turning all "wasted" social production into a "bread and circuses" style approval bonus would keep your treasury more stable, it would make actual control over how your resources are being allocated much more difficult. Instead of having a fluctuating treasury (which is very realistic, in addition to being easy to comprehend) you would have fluctuating morale, which is potentially far more dangerous and is less immediately visible when it is happening. That makes it more difficult to deal with, as the "low point" is what you'll need to maintain to avoid morale crashes and rebellion, while social spending that increased morale would be wasted just the same because you're already maintaining your morale at a level to avoid problems.

One possible solution would be to change the way that social or military "focus" works, converting a greater percentage of social or military production into your area of focus. Even if the penalty in the other type of production were much more severe than it currently is, that would still help cut back on unwanted production. If focus could be viewed and changed without going to the actual planet, this would be a very fast and convenient system. A real life example to help visualize this is the economy of the United States through World War 2: an enormous amount of civilian production was converted to military production during the war, and afterwards people used excess military hardware for civilian purposes. (The M4 Sherman did better as a bulldozer than it ever did as a tank, anyway.

) The current focus system does not reflect anywhere near this kind of wartime mobilization.

This suggestion is not mutually exclusive with the "social production -> morale" idea. Excess social production could still go toward bread and circuses (keeping the inflows/outflows stable) but the player would have the opportunity to limit waste through more powerful (but very simple) colony management options. This is more of a compromise position, somewhere between the "ineffective micromanagement" system that currently exists and the micromanagement jungle that would overrun the game if total control over every aspect of production were given on a planet by planet basis.

Essentially, the player would have four options for their planets. They could focus almost entirely on military production, focus almost entirely on social production, use the whole-empire settings set in the domestic management screen, or focus on research with a similar impact that the game uses currently. It doesn't make much sense for industrial capacity to be turned into research very efficiently, but civilian and military production are quite interchangable in real life. Most games represent this with a "hammers" system, but I believe that an option to split production between military and social uses is a realistic and enjoyable feature as long as the player has the capability to convert most or all of it back and forth at the cost of some efficiency.

In the end, the player could make a dedicated ship-building planet that is not also pumping out social production, or they could have a planet that is suffering very low approval focus on social production to overcome low morale with a global shopping spree. While most planets would benefit the most from using the default settings, it is the planets on the extreme ends of development that cause the most problems with the current system. Either your industrial centers are producing enormous amounts of unused social production (which ends up as either wasted credits or morale that you may not want need, which is a waste of credits) or your smaller colonies end up without the social production necessary for them to grow.

An even more streamlined solution proposed by Koshn bears repeating in its entirety.

For those planets without current social production, how about splitting their social allocation between research and military until a new social project begins? That way, nothing is wasted and as far as the overal economy goes, it doesn't look any different.

What are the merits and drawbacks of these two proposals? Which do you prefer and why? As for my opinion, I think that the first would involve the player making a few meaninful decisions and is not mutually exclusive with the "excess social production -> approval" system that Frogboy mentioned. The second suggestion would result in utmost efficiency at all times with basically no micromanagement, but the perfect efficiency would remove the player from the equation and make the "social production -> approval" system impossible. I think the system that Frogboy suggested has good gameplay potential, but doesn't go far enough to solve the problems related to wasted social production.

Are there other alternatives that haven't been mentioned here? The thread linked to at the beginning of this post is more concerned with how to deal with the problem as it currently exists, while I would like this thread to be more directed towards finding a creative solution to the problem that fits with what Stardock has planned.

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